Sherman Alexie Opens Up to Buzzfeed News

Author Sherman Alexie opens up to Buzzfeed News journalist Anne Helen Petersen about his Spokane reservation adolescence, and how the experience led him to become one of the most outspoken, politically-engaged artists today. In spite of his well-known fame, Alexie has been getting death threats from Trump's supporters that, in some cases, have forced him to cancel speaking engagements. "Since the election, Sherman Alexie’s been getting death threats. He got so many leading up to his commencement speech at Washington’s Gonzaga University in late May that he considered canceling his appearance," Petersen writes. Let's start there:

“I’m a Commie liberal brown dude,” he told me on a sunny June day in Seattle, where he’s lived for the last 20 years. “I don’t believe them, but it still creates such fear — like with the candidates dropping out of races because of death threats. I don’t think it would happen to them, and I don’t think it’s going to happen to me. But I do think that a brown-skinned liberal activist is gonna get assassinated." Five minutes earlier, Alexie was talking about his new memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, which had just come out that morning. His face had appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday arts section, with a photo of him looking reflective. A friend texted him, “You look like Javier Bardem’s having a bad day.”

Recounting the text, Alexie burst into a deep belly laugh that reverberated through the entire coffee shop. His friend isn’t wrong, though: Alexie, who recently turned 50, has developed something of a silver fox aesthetic. When we met, he was wearing a gray granddad cardigan and khakis, but at a reading, the next night, he wore a beautifully tailored suit — the sort of thing you rarely see in fleece-wearing Seattle.

Today, Alexie’s baseline is anxious. “I’m a wreck,” he said. “I barely slept last night. Just constant nightmares of things crushing me.” While this might be his 26th book — and the vast amount of his fiction, poetry, and filmmaking has been influenced, in ways overt and subtle, by his own life — it’s his first true memoir. And it’s about his mother, Lillian, a strong and fearsome woman he describes as “the lifeguard on the shores of Lake Fucked.”

Lillian ensured Alexie survived his life on the Spokane reservation, but she could also be a cruel, exacting, and profoundly unloving mother. It’s an exquisite, wrenching book — and one of the fullest portraits of an imperfect woman I’ve read. “She was a great human being, who had greatness in her. She could’ve led the tribe,” Alexie said. “My mother was a great woman — but not a great mother.”

Read on at Buzzfeed.